Laura M Guerard

Elemental is a beautiful, heartwarming, tearjerker of a story, and I love that it is clean, nonviolent, and imparts positive messages. I left the cinema feeling revitalized and optimistic.

Little Women is cinematic splendor masterfully brought to life by the brilliant Greta Gerwig. If Hayao Miyazaki made a live action film, it would be a similar rainbow of colors and emotions... like watching a living painting. If such a thing exists, it's a perfect film.

A 90-minute dialogue. These actors deserve better roles and made this film the best it could possibly be.

I didn't plan to watch Earwig due to the scathing reviews. I'm also not a fan of cgi. However, I love Diana Wynne Jones and read Earwig and the Witch last week, which piqued my interest in the film. My son and I loved it and watched it 2 days in a row! He's 5, so it's geared towards him, but he enjoyed it so much, even in Japanese, that he immediately wanted to rewatch. I summarized the dialogue as we watched and that was fine for him. I felt the film adequately captured the spirit of the novel, and the added elements rounded the plot out nicely. My son loved the music and I felt the film ended less abruptly than the book and we both loved the final scene and ending credits (with Ghibli goose eggs). The characters closely resemble Paul Zalinsky's illustrations, except for the Mandrake, and I greatly prefer the Ghibli rendition. The cgi, for what it's worth, is about as good as it gets and did not detract from my enjoyment as I had expected. The studio obviously put forth a lot of creative energy to make the film magical, and for me it is. The voice actors are talented and the characters are expressive in voice and face. I can't wait to watch for a third time.